RELATED RESEARCH PROJECTS

Catastrophic events such as Fukushima and Katrina have made it clear that integrating physical and social causes of failure into a cohesive modeling framework is critical in order to prevent complex technological accidents and to maintain public safety and health. In this research, experts in Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA), Organizational Behavior and Information Science and Data Analytics disciplines collaborate to provide answers to the following key questions: what social and organizational factors affect technical system risk; how and why do these factors influence risk; and how much do they contribute to risk? In addition to scientific contributions to organizational science, PRA, and data analytics, this research provides regulatory and industry decision-makers with...

IN THE NEWS

Family relationships play a role in the business world, but what about academia? An international team of researchers, including Assistant Professor Vetle Torvik, has discovered that family background, or kinship, can influence academic careers just as it does in other sectors of society.

The researchers examined coauthorship surname patterns in five decades of health science literature worldwide. Using the PubMed database, with over twenty-one million papers, they identified country-specific trends over time and found that coauthors who are part of a kin tend to hold central positions in their collaborative networks. Torvik's contribution to the research was to conduct the geocoding and disambiguation of author names; without these enabling technologies, the analysis of such large-scale data would not have been possible.

Elizabeth Jeanne Brucker (MS ’94) was known for her commitment to excellence in her education and career, and for her loyalty to friends and willingness to help others in any way she could. Though Brucker passed away not long after completing her master’s degree and embarking on her career as a librarian, her family and friends ensured that her values and commitment would not be forgotten.

Her legacy lives on today through the Elizabeth Jeanne Brucker Scholarship at GSLIS, which was established by Brucker, her family, and her coworkers. The scholarship supports GSLIS master’s students, and priority is given to individuals who work in library support positions, as Brucker did while pursuing her own master’s degree.

“It was typical of Liz, I think, that as a librarian she remembered the difficulties—especially financial—that she and other support staff members had experienced, and that she wanted to do something to remedy the situation,” said Carol Iglauer, who worked...

GSLIS Professor Bertram Ludäscher has been named the new director of the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Ludäscher is a leading figure in scientific data and knowledge management, focusing on the modeling, design, and optimization of workflows, foundations of provenance, data integration, and knowledge representation. He co-founded the open source Kepler project, and is a current member of the DataONE leadership team. As part of the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded Kurator project, a collaboration with the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, Ludäscher is developing data curation technology for automating quality control of biodiversity data. He is also leading the NSF-funded Euler project, which is developing...